Rippon, who had studied ballet as a child, astonished the world with the high-kick that followed. Now aged 78, she again astonished the world, with another high kick: one that seemed to go on several degrees past the point where most people’s legs stop bending even in the prime of life.

I’m not sure what the rather slicker and glitzier American Dancing With The Stars would make of a 78-year-old in sequins doing the splits live on Strictly Come Dancing, let alone the magnificently lumpen dad-dancing on display from newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy and veteran presenter Les Dennis. Certainly, Tucker Carlson’s cheerfully amateur cha-cha in series 3 of DWTS didn’t get nearly as forgiving a reception from the judges as Dennis’ gawky tango last week.

But if there’s one thing the British are good at, it’s exporting formats that get adopted internationally with local variations. Arguably our most successful ones in that sense are common law, and perhaps the business suit — but Strictly is surely up there as well. There are versions of the show in more than 75 countries, and they garner millions of viewers every year.

When a nation is so talented at white-labelling its own culture for overseas propagation, can it be said still to have a culture at all? The popular answer, among Britain’s contemporary elite, is “no”, quite the opposite: Britain, and England in particular, is believed not to possess a tradition or sensibility of its own. Rather, all our ostensibly native traditions, foods and saints originate elsewhere, while our monarchy is German. There’s a whole genre of social-media post dedicated to such assertions — shared, especially on St George’s Day, as a kind of national anti-ritual of self-effacement.

But a distinctive British sensibility does in fact exist, and has done for a very long time. It’s not clipped vowels and big houses: it’s a blend of singalong, smut, spectacle and sentiment, discernible in popular entertainment all the way back to the fairgrounds of the 17th century and probably further yet. It elicited loud tutting from middle-class moral reformers in the Victorian age, and goes largely ignored by our own middle-class moral reformers. And yet the British version of Strictly is so well-loved because it captures that ancient sensibility, in note-perfect contemporary form.

More from this author

The dark truth about Taylor Swift

By Mary Harrington

Like snooker or Formula One, Strictly is for viewing with others. The pace is glacial, while every programme is highly structured. It’s ideal for half-watching while chatting or doing the ironing, then replaying at work on Monday. It’s not meant to be clever, different, innovative or ground-breaking. It’s meant to be for everyone.

And if each episode has a familiar formula, so too does each series. The overall effect is reassuring: some things never change. As Anton du Beke said last week: “The children back at school, the world is right again — Strictly is back on the telly!”

But if the show itself is an institution, the tradition from which it emerges is older still. In the 17th century, London’s fairs were not just about buying and selling. Events such as Bartholomew Fair were also sources of entertainment for all social classes. They combined trade with puppetry, performing animals, and shows that mixed vocal music with acrobatic spectacle such as rope-dancing.

As Britain industrialised in the 18th century, such seasonal events gave way to more permanent venues for commerce. And as the country grew wealthier, the booming urban population also demanded permanent facilities for commercial leisure. The style of entertainment that once frequented fairgrounds migrated to the “song and supper rooms” that grew out of pubs and coffee houses, and to urban pleasure gardens. These attracted working and lower middle-class people, often (but not always) men. Often a tough crowd, they would pelt disappointing performers with food, bottles, boots, or even dead animals.

But by the 19th century, music-halls were being purpose-built, with the stage front and centre, and bar facilities withdrawn to a “promenade” behind the seating. Canterbury Music Hall in Lambeth was rebuilt in 1855 to house an audience of 1,500. By the mid-19th century, then, London had between 200 and 300 such venues, where the sexes rubbed shoulders and prostitutes prowled.

This music-hall mix of smutty acts, flirting opportunities, and ladies for hire made such venues a target for moral reformers, who warned of the licentiousness and “demoralisation” they encouraged. Of particular offence were the “tableaux vivants”, live-action re-makes of famous artworks that used a sometimes-tenuous link to high art as an excuse to show off women wearing only a thin, flesh-toned layer to simulate nudity. Despite reformers’ efforts, though, the music hall thrived until the First World War — after which it gradually foundered in the new post-war age of jazz and moving pictures.

And yet the British are often reluctant to throw away something that works. So, variety adapted, embracing both jazz and the moving image, and becoming the “light entertainment” that formed the backbone of mid-century British television. From the bouffant naffness of Cilla Black and Terry Wogan, through easy-listening flautists and Children In Need and ballroom dancing (hosted by Angela Rippon, of course), to Des O’Connor and brass bands and syrupy children’s choirs and the time-honoured British tradition of the novelty Christmas Number One, Britain’s enduring love of variety entertainment has not wavered. Our heritage may be marketed overseas as laced corsets and emotional constipation, but Britain’s real heartbeat is Military Wives and singalong choruses, innuendo and “Grandma, We Love You”.

Suggested reading

The music-hall depravity of British politics

By Alwyn Turner

So much so that St Winifred’s School Choir — the originators of “There’s No one Quite Like Grandma” — got back together, 38 years later, for a Christmas show in 2018. Innuendo has hardly disappeared, either, since Victorian times. In 1895, erotic magazine The Mascot described a music-hall chorus girl in distinctly horny tones:

With gesture trim she throws her limb
Out from her hip elastic
And for a fact, it’s not exact
-ly what you’d call Monastic

This is much the same mix of humour, understatement, and innuendo that greeted Angela Rippon’s leg reveal in 1976 — and its reprise in 2023. For Strictly today continues the tradition: a bit too much leg, and slightly too clingy clothing, and a bit too much pelvic action, but with a side order of muffled giggling that means you can watch it all with your nan.

It’s a testament to the enduring hold this mixture has on the national soul that it has survived not one but two revolutions in format: first the post-war transition to telly, and subsequently our arrival in the digital age. If anything, the smartphone era has intensified variety’s interactive, music-hall energy. Strictly pre-dated the first iPhone by only four years, and has leaned hard into the appetite the new medium has generated for 360-degree, access-all-areas content. Today, the Strictly fandom generates a well of tabloid gossip, montages, reviews, behind-the-scenes clips, interviews, spats. Secondary content extends the central dance-show material more or less as far as you’re willing to scroll.

And at the heart of it all, the vibe is much the same as ever. A bit horny, but playful with it; a bit glitzy, but with a hint of irony. And always, at heart, deeply sentimental: for the subset of Britons who dabbed their eye to “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” has always been far more numerous than the subset who cringed and covered their ears. One of this year’s contestants, Bobby Brazier, has already revealed his desire to dedicate a dance number to his mum, the late reality TV star Jade Goody — a move that places him squarely in this pleasantly lachrymose tradition.

And thus, perhaps by accident, the overall Strictly vibe is considerably more conservative than the often painfully progressive BBC that produces it. But this is true in a Burkean way that’s also British, in the best sense: pragmatic, demotic, and driven less by principles than a reluctance to change something that’s working just fine.

More from this author

The abject failure of Cool Britannia

By Mary Harrington

The structure of each show honours the beauty of ritual and repetition, while Strictly itself honours the longstanding continuity of popular entertainment itself. It has updated the format a little, in line with the country’s shifting demographic makeup and social attitudes, and perhaps the result paints an over-optimistic picture of how comfortable the culture is with these changes — or indeed how well Britain is flourishing overall today. But it’s not meant to be gritty realism.

In any case, such nods to the 21st century feel like minor adjustments, not radical cultural surgery. For both audience and contestants are, broadly speaking, unchanged: alternately sentimental and smutty, glitter-loving but gently ironic, tribal yet adaptable, and generous about cheering on the dad-dancing underdog.

Our moral betters may view this Britain as irredeemably wicked, or else — as when the Strictly format is sold overseas — as a translucent medium in which other cultures may be foregrounded. But away from the cultural cringe typical of the over-educated, Britain is still there. As showcased in Strictly’s 21st-century music hall, we’re much the same people as we have been for centuries.

“Hello CQ, hello CQ. This is Two Emma Toc, Two-ooo Emma Toc. Writtle calling… Well, I think we’re ready to begin now, and the first thing I’ve got to introduce is a record entitled — Why are records always entitled, why aren’t they just called something? So here it is, a record entitled…”

Four years earlier, Captain Peter Eckersley had been a wireless operator in the Royal Flying Corps. Now, as an engineer with the Marconi Wireless Telegram Company, he was launching Britain’s first weekly radio station, broadcasting under the call sign 2MT (“Two Emma Toc”). Eckersley was a joker, a character, a bit of a card. And every Tuesday, radio enthusiasts across south-eastern England would tune their sets to catch his latest offering: a quiz, perhaps, or a spoof weather forecast.

Eckersley and his pals put on Britain’s first ever radio play, an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. They persuaded some of the capital’s most popular singers to trek out to Writtle and perform into the ether. On one memorable occasion the world-famous Danish-American baritone Lauritz Melchior even agreed to trudge across the fields to the Writtle army hut and sing to an audience of… hundreds? Thousands? Who knows?

What happened at Writtle a hundred years ago isn’t just a lovely little tale about the triumph of the amateur spirit. It’s the origin story of one of Britain’s most beloved and controversial institutions, the BBC, which celebrates its centenary this autumn. And since the BBC’s future has never been more contested, with Boris Johnson’s government publicly contemplating the end of the licence fee and a turn towards a subscription model, it’s worth looking back at how it all began.

To its defenders, the BBC represents the collective national good over selfish private interest. But is that really true? If you were feeling cynical, you might argue that it began as a commercial monopoly to promote the interests of the major electronics firms. Its champions celebrate it as modern history’s greatest vehicle for popular cultural uplift. But you could just as well see it as a massive exercise in selling radios.

More from this author

Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

To the BBC’s fans that probably sounds like sacrilege, so let’s go back to that man in the hut. Peter Eckersley didn’t just happen to work for Marconi. The fact that he worked for the Marconi Company, one of the most innovative, ruthless and expansionist firms in the land, was absolutely crucial. Since the end of the First World War, Marconi’s engineers had wasted no opportunity to promote the latest wireless technology. It was Marconi, for example, that organised Britain’s first live radio broadcast on 15 June 1920, when the soprano Dame Nellie Melba performed at its Chelmsford factory. This was a landmark in broadcasting history, with people reportedly tuning in from as far away as the Champs-Elysées. These days, though, the BBC makes little of it. Why not? Alas, it was sponsored by the Daily Mail. Quelle horreur!

You can draw a line directly from Dame Nellie’s performance, via Eckersley’s hut, to the formation of the British Broadcasting Company on 18 October 1922, and the Marconi name is there at every turn. In one crucial memo, the firm’s publicity manager, Arthur Burrows, argued that they could make an awful lot of money through the “radiation” of entertainment to the public, rather than by merely selling hardware to the government. So perhaps, in some parallel universe, there’s a Britain in which the Marconi Company really did establish its own private radio service, and where the papers are currently badgering the Marconi streaming giant to cancel Jimmy Carr.

But as we know, things didn’t work out like that. In a world obsessed with the danger of political and cultural disorder, the men who ran the General Post Office were anxious to avoid the “chaos” of the United States, where hundreds of radio start-ups had blossomed in 1921 and 1922. What was more, state control had been legitimised by the experience of total war, covering everything from military conscription to pub opening times. Much better, they thought, to have a single authorised broadcaster, a state-approved consortium: a British Broadcasting Company.

So in the autumn of 1922 the six largest firms, led by Marconi, formed a monopoly, authorised by the General Post Office and funded by a 10-shilling radio licence fee. And everybody won. The BBC set out on the path that would lead to Fawlty Towers, I, Claudius, Blake’s 7 and Eldorado. Arthur Burrows became its first director of programmes. Eckersley became its first chief engineer. And Marconi sold thousands and thousands of radios.

Why isn’t this story better known? The BBC’s centenary website, barely mentions it at all. Its timeline begins in the autumn of 1922, erasing poor Dame Nellie and skipping the Writtle story entirely. The explanation is obvious. The Marconi story just doesn’t fit. The history of the BBC is supposed to be an object lesson in paternalistic liberalism and public service, but the Marconi story is all about private enterprise. Marconi meant novelty; Marconi meant disruption. But today’s BBC is the guardian of continuity, a reassuring comfort blanket in a world of change. How do Dame Nellie and the Daily Mail fit into that?

More from this author

How to bring down a Prime Minister

By Dominic Sandbrook

It’s easy to see why the BBC has forgotten its entrepreneurial prehistory. By the time of its 20th birthday in 1942, it had transcended its buccaneering origins to become a genuinely national institution, the voice of a people standing together against the horrors of Nazism. For the next few decades, it was one of the chief pillars of the social democratic consensus, the broadcasting equivalent of the NHS.

This BBC didn’t just influence the national conversation; it was the national conversation. Famously, the very last show Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise made for the corporation, which went out on Christmas Day 1977, was watched by more than 20 million people. The supporting cast — Elton John, Michael Parkinson, Penelope Keith, Richard Briers, Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Frank Bough, James Hunt, Angela Rippon — was a Who’s Who of the British imagination, every name immediately recognisable. When you walked down the street the next day, almost half of the adults you met had seen it.

In his novel The Rotter’s Club (2001), Jonathan Coe uses that Morecambe and Wise Christmas special as a symbol of national consensus, the teenage hero realising that everybody he knows is watching it too. “It came to him,” writes Coe,

“that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets… all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of… oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter.”

There’s an underlying melancholy to that scene, though. By the time Coe wrote The Rotter’s Club, the BBC’s paternalistic monopoly was already under siege. The first blow came in 1955 with the launch of ITV, followed by the advent of Channel Four in 1982. British Satellite Broadcasting arrived in 1986, Sky three years later. We all know the rest: the internet, Amazon, Netflix, Disney. Or to put it another way, change — the kind of technological and cultural innovation previously embodied by the men in that Writtle hut.

It’s change, not Conservative hostility — and certainly not Nadine Dorries — that represents the real threat to the BBC’s survival. In the last few weeks its defenders on social media have circulated a wonderful advert from 1986, in which pub bore John Cleese curses the licence fee and wonders what the BBC “has ever given us for fifty-eight quid”. Up pops a host of famous faces — Sir Michael Hordern, Barry Norman, Alan Whicker, Sir Patrick Moore — to put him right.

It’s heart-warming, nostalgic stuff. But to anybody under the age of 30 it must be completely irrelevant. Most of those people have long since died, retired or been cancelled. They’re relics of a vanished age.

It’s telling, then, that when people try to defend the BBC, they typically point to Strictly Come Dancing and Doctor Who — two shows that, one way or another, could have been watched by Sir Winston Churchill in his dotage. Strictly’s current incarnation dates from 2004, but in its original form, as plain Come Dancing, it dates from 1949. As for Doctor Who, it dates from 1963 and is now attracting its lowest audience since the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. In a bid to revive its fortunes, the BBC have just persuaded its former writer Russell T. Davies, who ran the show more than a decade ago, to return to the helm. You can’t get much more backward-looking than that.

Suggested reading

Why the BBC is still selling Savile

By Tanya Gold

I take no pleasure in pointing this out. For anybody like me, born in the Seventies or earlier, a world without the BBC seems unimaginable. I have merely to hear the opening bars of Grandstand, a staple of my Saturdays for decades, and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. But Grandstand has been dead for 15 years, rendered obsolete when the BBC’s commercial rivals snapped up all the sports rights. And although Match of the Day endures, it’s easy to imagine a future in which Amazon bags the Premiership highlights. How long before that jaunty theme music vanishes forever? Five years? Ten?

Against that background, talk of the current government’s “attack” on the BBC strikes me as fundamentally inconsequential. Even if Boris Johnson’s successor kneels in penance outside Broadcasting House and promises to preserve the licence fee till the end of time, the basic problem remains: the BBC was designed for radio and television sets, not for mobile phones and iPads. It’s a national institution in a globalised world, a product of the twentieth century struggling to stay afloat in the twenty-first.

A few weeks ago a YouGov poll found that only one in four people aged 18-30 watch the BBC every week. A third of them never watch it at all. No doubt some will graduate to the BBC’s output as they grow older — but surely not all of them. What about today’s primary-school children? Will the Marvel and Mandalorian addicts be watching Newsnight in the year 2040? Will they really still be clinging to Grandad’s comfort blanket?

To some readers, I know, this probably sounds like heresy, a premature obituary for a much-loved institution. But I do like the BBC. (I don’t “love” it, obviously, because I’ve worked for it, and nobody who’s been a victim of its taxi-booking system is ever going to love it.) And because I’m a nostalgic, backward-looking sort of person, I want it to survive. I adore In Our Time, I love The Apprentice (I know, ridiculous) and I still watch Doctor Who, albeit out of a joyless sense of duty.

Much of what the BBC does, it does brilliantly. I’ll be sorry, then, when it goes. But it will go, eventually. Or rather, it’ll probably fragment into its constituent parts, some of which will charge for subscriptions. No doubt it’ll be a gradual process, and many people will barely notice. On Twitter, the BBC’s champions will lament the death of a common national culture. But our common national culture has been fragmenting for decades, which is why Jonathan Coe lamented its passing more than 20 years ago.

Cultural moments come and go. Institutions are born and they die. In fact, everything dies; that’s how history works. The future belongs to the ambitious, the disruptive, the change-makers — people like the engineers in that hut. But these days, people like that don’t work for the BBC. They work for Amazon.

This was a loyalty test to the Pax Romana, targeted especially at Christians, for whom pagan sacrifices were inherently sinful. Failure to sacrifice to the ancient gods was punishable by torture and death. Some Christians refused and were martyred, including Pope Fabian himself. Others went into hiding. Some went through the motions, made the sacrifice, and so were excommunicated.

After the persecution died down, a furious row erupted within the church concerning the re-admission of the lapsed. Some maintained there was to be no readmission whatsoever. Others were content with a simple confession and repentance. An ideological war broke out between these sides, both electing their own bishops, both setting up a church within a church to battle it out with each other.

Some church leaders, notably St Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, tried to steer a middle path. He was largely successful, not least because of the credit he had established on both sides through his widely appreciated pastoral response to the pandemic that came to be named after him. But despite his success in ameliorating a divided church, there was one principle on which he wouldn’t budge, and his formulation of it became a central feature of Roman Catholic doctrine: extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Outside the church there is no salvation. The fallen had to be re-admitted to the church because outside the church there is only eternal damnation.

Suggested reading

Is Jeremy Corbyn anti-Semitic?

By Giles Fraser

Parallels with the current travails of the Labour party are hard to miss. Pope Starmer has re-admitted the lapsi, based on a flimsy expression of repentance, hoping the fact that he is generally perceived to be having a good pandemic will distract the No Readmission party. And it may. But although these parallels are something of a historical parlour game, the principle that lies behind them remains as strong and as contentious as ever it was: extra Ecclesiam nulla salus – outside the party there is no salvation.

To many of us, who just don’t care about party politics as much as those within the Westminster bubble, the comings and goings of Corbyn, or indeed of Cummings for that matter, are nowhere near as important as they are to the true believers. Corbyn protested his suspension by re-affirming his total loyalty to the party of which, he reminded people, he has been a member of for 54 years. Nor could he bring himself to update his Twitter profile: “Labour MP for Islington North.” Life outside the party would be unimaginable for him. In a Cyprian-like compromise, Starmer has now allowed Corbyn back in to the Labour Party; though, for the time being, without the party whip. It doesn’t make much sense. But that isn’t really the point. Like Cyprian, Starmer is trying to manage some bitter divisions, and a messy compromise is the obvious path to tread.

Of course, there are many who have flourished extra Ecclesiam. Ed Balls reinvented himself through sequins, from a party hack with something of a hard man reputation, to become a personable almost national treasure. Something similar happened with Michael Portillo and trains. There is, it seems life beyond the party. Politics isn’t everything. Indeed, it is precisely by accepting that idea that some find rehabilitation, new life.

And here we come to the heart of Corbyn’s fundamental weakness as a politician. He is too much in love with the party, with its ideology, with its internal struggles, to connect up with those for whom politics is not everything. One just cannot imagine him outside the Labour party, and nor, it seems, can he. And because of this, he has missed his opportunity for redemption.

This is what he should have done. He should have put on his wellington boots and settled down on his allotment to tend his leeks. A period of silence would have been welcome. And a more genuine act of contrition. But above all, he, like so many politicians, just needed to discover who he is outside of the confines of his narrow little church. I don’t know what the secular equivalent to this is, but he needed to spend a bit more time on his own with his God.

Suggested reading

No, my marriage is not a "second holocaust"

By Giles Fraser

Princess Margaret was given a very perceptive line in the new series of The Crown. Invited to a weekend up at Balmoral, Mrs Thatcher continued to work on her dispatch boxes rather than go out stalking with the royal family. No time for fun, Thatcher insisted tartly. But she might find something much more important than fun out on the moors, the Princess shot back. She might find “perspective”. And in that single word, the princess captured so much that can be lacking in the professional politician.

Everything may be political, but the political isn’t everything. Most people have far more important things going on in their lives – their loved ones, their families (not necessarily the same thing), doing the shopping, listening to music, yes, even watching Strictly and The Crown. Generally speaking, the Conservatives tend to understand this much better than the Labour party. They are often the political party voted for by those who do not think that politics is the most important thing in the world. It is significant, for instance, that the Conservatives have something like just 190,000 members, whereas Labour has well over half a million, most of them having joined after Jeremy Corbyn became leader.

This is often seen as a Labour strength, and, of course, having activists turn out and bang on doors, is a real campaigning advantage. But it comes with its downside too. For when a political party is dominated by true believers, perspective narrows and it becomes obsessed with what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. It’s not unlike that with church. Yes, it is good to have people who make the church their life. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the church being able to continue without such people. But this also is true: too much religion is bad for your faith. What begins as a life transforming dialogue with the infinite can all too easily end up being a bitter row with the flower arrangers, or about who gets to sit in what pew.

Suggested reading

Is Corbyn really an anti-Semite?

By Paul Embery

That is what Corbyn did to the Labour party. Yes, his lazy and complacent attitude towards anti-Semitism – even complicit attitude – has damaged the party for a generation at least. But there was something else that he got badly wrong: he seemed to act as though his party was more important than the country that he apparently wanted to lead. And he inspired others to think the same. Party above all things. That is why his suspension from Labour was so impossible for him to bear. He is a man who has nothing left outside the party, a man whose identity is so consumed by left wing ideology that there is nothing remaining when that is gone. Corbyn without Labour was the shell of a man. And very few ordinary voters can identify with such a view.

The greatest ever Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, offered a very different perspective to that of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. He argued that the church is “the only organisation that exists solely for the benefit of non-members”. It’s a great line — though it is not only churches that work like this, and indeed, a great many churches don’t. Under Corbyn, the Labour party retreated down the rabbit hole of increasing ideological purity, obsessed with their own inner workings. And what many members still fail to grasp is that, unlike them, most people don’t like politics. And these are the people whose votes they need. This is a kind of paradox: to really succeed in politics you have to care more about things beyond it.